Category Archives: writing

Angelic Bookstore Owners

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Bookstore owners are the sweetest, smartest people in the world. Trust me on this. ;]

Jack and I had a really busy month in July, with a sick foster cat (TEAM HAZEL FOR THE WIN) and a final push on finishing our basement so we could get moved in and turn upstairs into the SECOND STORY EATERY.  Jack was just back from leading his annual Scottish tour (next year now booking) and he was the wee bit under the weather. Yuppie stress in the grand scheme of the world, but it induced an aversion to doing anything besides sitting quietly on a Friday evening, staring at the wallpaper.

But Angelic Towe, owner of MariaJoseph Books in Wallach House, downtown Eureka, Missouri, had asked us ages ago to come do a book event in her bookstore. The store she started after reading my book. (Does this make me legally culpable?)

And poor Angelic, the week before we were to sojourn at her lakeside house for the event plus an extra day of swimming and sunning, was descended upon by family members under some surprise stress. En masse. Her bedrooms filled, her fridge emptied, and her Mom heart expanded.

We said, “Let’s just reschedule.” She took it bravely, but it slipped out that she’d “done some publicity.” So we said “OK, let’s get ‘er done.”

And when we arrived last night to the hotel she’d booked for us–gorgeous and with a SWIMMING POOL–in the midst of her own stress, she’d left us a chocolate bar and a gift card to a local restaurant. When we went to the first gig she’d arranged, we saw the “publicity”: elegant postcards in lovely color tones with antique script, touting the event at Angelic’s store.

Plus, her kids helped make cookies for today.

On the way home from Angelic’s, we will make a swift detour through Granite City, IL to BSR Used Books. Owner Bruce Campbell coined the phrase TEAM HAZEL FOR THE WIN while keeping up with the saga of our elderly, sick foster cat. He’s been one of her staunchest supporters in her new life in North Carolina (complete with her own Facebook page, as befits a celebricat). We look forward to meeting him.

And we will be stopping off in Indiana as well, but that’s a surprise we’ll keep for a later blog. Suffice it to say we’re meeting some (more) very cool people for a very fun reason.

Yes, ladies and gentlemen, it behooves us all to make friends with independent bookstore owners: sweet, cool, smart people. They care about cats, and they make cookies.

In fact, I’m pretty sure it is independent bookstore owners and school teachers who form the safety net enclosing the world, keeping it from flying apart.

Book Trails

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You know those “where’s George” dollar bills in circulation? And the “book crossing” books released in airports and waiting rooms, with a stamp inside to show where it’s been?

Well, book trails are similar. Book trails are the marginalia, the inside cover notes, and the other writings of humans on the artifacts of gathered wisdom, left like messages in a book bottle for us to find.

Jack and I had several boxes of donated books come in from a family clearing out an old house. Think pre-WWII textbooks and reading club hardbacks from the 1960s. We regard such donations with mixed emotions, as 95 percent will be junk. BUT there will be some cool things in there – and there might even be one or two books we can actually sell.

This time, two books caught my attention. One was a 1942 Home Economics Text. In its sturdy green (grubby) linen jacket, The Book of Home Economics by Mary Learning (poor woman; her name was her destiny) stood out from the rest because of a coda inked on its cover.

Printed in such excellent penmanship that at first it looked like a continuation of the title, were the words “In Case of Fire, Please Throw In.”

Ah, anonymous fed-up student of the 1940s, we feel your pain. And we’re glad you found a way to fight back that left us howling with sudden laughter, seventy years later. I hope your grandchildren know what a hoot you were in school.

The other book was a bit more… poignant. Stolen Lives by Elissa Wall and Lisa Pulitzer was published in 2009 and is still selling briskly. It’s about young brides forced into polygamous marriages. This one was hardcover, had lost its dust jacket, and was seriously beat up.

But inside the cover, written in a large scrawl, I found: “Josh does not think I should be with Aaron. He thinks I am too good for Aaron but he doesn’t understand that Aaron is too good for me. He thinks everyone likes the people who like them. But we like who we like. I wish I didn’t like Aaron. Aaron doesn’t like me.”

I wish I could think of a better expression of empathy than “Ah, shit, kid.”

It reminds me of Dodie Smith’s wonderful book I Capture the Castle, wherein the young protagonist describes love as a game of Pass the Parcel gone horribly wrong. Everyone is in love with someone who’s in love with someone else.

Book trails: markers on our individual journeys, reminding us that many have trod similar paths–toward love, toward life, toward families, toward death.

It never hurts to look up from a book now and again, and smile at the people around you. We’re making our solo journeys together.